Please Just Take These Photos From My Hands
by Summoner Luna
Summary: She's never been very good at hiding her emotions. Xx. Laguna, Rinoa. She questions. He answers. It's okay to cry. xX


"He went without you?"

Rinoa sat on a bench, skirt folded neatly under her, and lowered her book upon being addressed.

"He said he wanted to do it alone." She looked across the dirt road to the fields, where the silhouette of a man stood staring at something hidden in the grass. "I think he needed to."

"I get that," Laguna said, smiling sadly.

"Have a seat," Rinoa gestured to the rest of the bench, closing her book and tucking in into a bag that sat at her feet. Laguna sat beside her, and they watched the horizon together for a minute. He broke focus first, feeling, Rinoa imagined, that even watching from a distance was an invasion of privacy.

"So uh... whatcha reading?" He asked.

"It's a short story collection. Good to take on trips like this, since no matter how interested I get, the ending isn't too far away."

"Ah. My books are mostly pictures."

"They're still books."

Laguna smiled again, and stretched his arm across the bench behind her. Rinoa stole another glance across the fields, where Squall still had not moved. She wanted to be beside him, to know what he was feeling, to at least stretch the fingers of her mind and hold him, but she knew that being alone was probably all that was allowing him to feel.

"You think he's praying?"

"He doesn't pray."

"I didn't either, until the first time I went out there."

Laguna did not sound serious very often, and the conversation always felt remarkably intimate when he did. Unconsciously, she sat up straighter. She had watched her mother's burial and visited her often. To wait seventeen years to say goodbye...

"Laguna..."

"You want to ask me about your mother, right?"

She turned to face him, preparing to answer but couldn't seem to force out the words. She settled on nodding, pulling her jacket more tightly around her.

"Your mother... Julia..."

"Did you love her?" She blurted out, harsher than she meant it, but did not apologize.

"I did."

"But you never came back."

He looked now across the fields, not at Squall, but the great distance past the small town. "I wanted to, at first. You know what happened then, and I could blame it on the war, but..."

"But that wouldn't be true?" Her voice was softer now. She had not intended to sound so accusatory.

Laguna shook his head. "The truth is, Rinoa, I barely knew your mother. I admired her, and I did love her, but not the sort of love that lasts."

"She wrote you a song."

"She had that song mostly written long before me. I just... Helped with the lyrics. It's romantic to imagine, the stories that were printed in the magazines. Love, lost at war. But Julia and I..." He trailed off, and she felt the ghosts join them during the silence.

"The first time I saw you, I thought you were her," he said.

"I hear that a lot. I'm shorter than she was."

"Hard to tell that in a spacesuit-"

Her breath caught, realizing he had seen her before they met in his office, during a time she could not remember.

"I just saw your face through that glass... I was sure I'd finally lost it."

"I... Don't think my mother would have done what I did."

"You didn't do that either, and I won't let you say you did."

She said nothing. No, she didn't do it. But she had still been chosen over all the others. She still let it happen.

"I almost wanted to chase after you, but everything happened so fast. Ellone told me...enough. She was smart enough not to tell me who Squall was until we were back in Esthar, at least."

"You would have gone after him? I thought he and Ellone were together?"

"Except for a few minutes, right after you left. She had enough time to tell me what was about to happen, and to evacuate. It wasn't until..." He rubbed his eyes, blinking in the sunlight. "Seventeen years. I hid in Esthar for seventeen years, and he was out there."

"You... Didn't know?" The weight of the realization crashed over her and she tried to hide it, to keep her face impassive, but she was never good at hiding her emotions.

Now Laguna looked shocked, turning to her so quickly she started. "Of course not! You... Does he think..."

"Yeah."

The hurt on his face was too much, and she wanted to look anywhere else. Of course he didn't know. She had said-told herself, told Squall, there had to be a good reason. Laguna was too nice, too ruled by his heart, there's no way he just didn't come back. But... He didn't know at all?

"Rinoa, when Raine... I sent Ellone here as soon as I found her, but I couldn't leave yet. I'd made a promise. I owed Ellone to Esthar. I never could have found her without their help, and I couldn't leave until I repaid them. I got a letter two weeks later telling me..." His voice caught in his throat, and Rinoa wanted to reach out, to comfort him in some way. "I should have come back anyway. The kids were probably still here, then. The letter said nothing about Squall. I didn't even know she was... They told me Ellone was being sent to an orphanage, where she would be safe."

"You let her go?"

"Losing Raine... There's no excuse, I should have taken her, let her live with me in Esthar, but I knew too much. We didn't know if there was another Sorceress, if Adel's chamber would hold. I had met Edea Kramer before, and I knew Ellone would be safe there."

The irony of sending her to a Sorceress to keep her safe from one did not escape her. "Didn't you want to visit?"

"I sent her letters at first. But after about five years... Edea told me they had moved her, and wouldn't tell me where."

"Did... The Kramers know?"

Laguna clenched his jaw and it was the only answer she needed. "They did what they did for a reason, too, Laguna," and it felt weird to defend them.

"I could have known him. Even if... Even if he stayed at Garden."

"It had to be this way." She let what Squall told her about time compression play in her mind. She could see things now, other histories that were not her own, and she felt herself in the courtyard. Would he have gotten lost, if he'd known his father?

"Do you think she loved Caraway?" The question flew out and she opened her eyes wide in apology. "I'm sorry, we weren't talking about-"

"-It's okay. We did start off talking about your mother."

"Yeah."

"Julia never did anything unless her heart was in it. Which, I've noticed, she passed down to you."

Rinoa smiled. She never got tired of the comparisons.

"You know I hadn't really been gone that long before they got married. Raine was such a huge fan, if that's not a twist of irony for you."

"Did she know that song was written for you?"

"I told her eventually, but I think she'd figured it out beforehand. I had disappeared during the war and she knew I was from Deling City, and the first time Kiros showed up here he mentioned her like she was someone we knew. Gosh it had to have been less than a year. No, I don't think she would have gotten involved so quickly if she hadn't loved him."

Again, Rinoa could not find a response. Her father had closed off after her mother died, and it was hard to imagine him as somebody her mother could have loved.

"We do stupid things in grief, Rinoa." She shifted uncomfortably, embarrassed at how many of her thoughts she was projecting.

"I never met your father personally. I saw him speak a couple of times, and everyone in the Galbadian Army knew who he was, even if he wasn't a General back then, and I can only imagine how hard he took it when she died. When I lost Raine I was so devastated I couldn't even come out to say goodbye. The memories were so painful. I couldn't see... I couldn't walk through the house we had shared together, go through her possessions... See her grave. It was easier to hide in work, to distract myself so completely there wasn't enough time to grieve, to put so much distance in between that I could pretend it was another life, when I was a different person and this place, that time, was nothing but a picture hanging on the wall.

"What Squall did for you... That is what your father and I couldn't. He couldn't save Julia anymore than I could save Raine, but Squall saved you."

She looked down again, her eyes burning. The panic of waking up in space, alone, was not something she would ever forget. When Squall was suddenly there, against all logic, against all hope... She thought of how she had felt in that desert of time. She was so sure she was too late, and she would have stayed there. How could she have come back without him?

Movement in the field caught her eye and she and Laguna both looked out and watched the second figure approach the grave, slow with respect but not hesitation. Watched her stop, watched the two of them thread their fingers together like they'd done it their whole lives.

"She told me, he was her only regret."

She blinked in response, and quickly wiped the responding tearsplash from her hand. "The orphanage?" She managed, before the white hot ball in her throat stole the rest of her words.

"She said all the years she spent on that ship she kept seeing him standing there in the rain, crying as they took her away. Oh, Rin, she was hysterical when that escape pod landed. It... I..." His voice broke. Rinoa took one of his hands and squeezed it.

_I know._

"Sorry, I..." he used his free hand to wipe the streaks from his face, but she could no longer pretend.

"Thanks." She turned her head to his shoulder and let herself cry, cry and watch with blurred vision as brother and sister knelt together in the distance, and she did not cry alone.


End file.
